What has been the
overall effect of the sudden, unprecedented and quite dramatic changes in the
Church which began with Vatican II? As Catholic writers have observed, what
Catholics have witnessed over the past 40 years represents a kind of
"Stalinization of the Roman Catholic Church" that bears an eerie resemblance to
what was called at the time "the Adaptation" of Russian Orthodoxy to the
demands of the Stalinist regime.

The subversion of the
Orthodox Church by Stalin is certainly among the developments in Russia
foreseen by the Virgin of Fatima. This is precisely why She came to call for
the consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart: so that Russia would
embrace the one true religion and the one true Church, not the schismatic
Orthodox Church which was founded in human rebellion against Rome when it left
the Mystical Body of Christ over 500 years ago, and thus was constitutionally
incapable of avoiding its total Adaptation to Stalinism.

The Orthodox
Adaptation began officially when the Metropolitan Sergius of the Russian
Orthodox Church published an "Appeal" in Isvestia on August 19, 1927.
The Appeal of Sergius, as it came to be known, set forth a new basis for the
activity of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian layman Boris Talantov
described this as "an Adaptation to the atheistic reality of the U.S.S.R." In
other words, the church had to find a way of living, so the argument goes, with
the "atheistic reality" of Stalinist Russia. So Sergius proposed what came to
be known in shorthand as the Adaptation.

The Adaptation
consisted first and foremost of a false separation between the so-called
spiritual needs of man, the purely religious needs of man, and his
socio-political needs. In other words, a separation of Church and State. The
church was to satisfy the purely religious needs of the citizens of the Soviet
Union but without touching on the socio-political structure which had been
erected by the Communist Party.

The Adaptation
required a new administration of the church in Russia according to guidelines
which were set forth after the appeal of Sergius was published. Basically this
came down to an agreement not to criticize the official ideology of the Soviet
Union under Stalin. And this would be reflected in all of the activities of the
church. Any opposition by the Russian Orthodox Church to the Soviet regime
would henceforth be considered a deviation from pure religious activity and a
form of counter-revolution which was no longer to be permitted or
countenanced.

In effect the Orthodox
Church, through its silence, became an arm of the Soviet state. In fact,
Sergius would go on to defend this betrayal and even call for the condemnation
and the sentencing to concentration camps of his own fellow Orthodox for
so-called counter-revolutionary activities. Talantov, who condemned the whole
Adaptation, described it this way: "In actual fact all religious activity was
reduced to external rites. The church preaching of those clergymen who held
strictly to the Adaptation was totally remote from life and therefore had no
influence whatever on hearers. As a result of this, the intellectual, social
and family life of believers, and the raising of the younger generation,
remained outside church influence. One cannot worship Christ and at the same
time in social and family life tell lies, do what is unjust, use violence, and
dream of an earthly paradise."1

This, then, is what
the Adaptation involved: The church would be silent about the evils of the
Stalinist regime. It would become a purely "spiritual" community "in the
abstract", would no longer voice opposition to the regime, would no longer
condemn the errors and lies of Communism, and would thus become the Church of
Silence, as Christianity behind the Iron Curtain was often called.

The Appeal of Sergius
caused a split in the Russian Orthodox Church. The real believers who rejected
the Adaptation, who denounced the Appeal and who remained attached to the
Metropolitan Joseph rather than Sergius, were arrested and sent to
concentration camps. Boris Talantov himself would eventually die in prison, as
a political prisoner of the Stalinist regime. Meanwhile, the Church of Silence,
in effect, was transformed into an organ of the KGB. Stalin decimated the
Russian Orthodox Church; all of the real Orthodox believers were sent off to
concentration camps or executed and replaced by KGB operatives.

Shortly before
Talantov died in August of 1967, he wrote as follows about the Adaptation:

The Adaptation to
atheism implanted by Metropolitan Sergius has concluded (been completed by) the
betrayal of the Orthodox Russian Church on the part of Metropolitan Nikodim and
other official representatives of the Moscow Patriarch based abroad. This
betrayal irrefutably proved by the documents cited must be made known to all
believers in Russia and abroad because such an activity of the Patriarchate,
relying on cooperation with the KGB, represents a great danger for all
believers. In truth, the atheistic leaders of the Russian people and the
princes of the Church have gathered together against the Lord and His
Church.2

Here Talantov refers
to the same Metropolitan Nikodim who induced the Vatican to enter into the
Vatican-Moscow Agreement, under which (as we showed in Chapter 6) the Catholic
Church was forced to remain silent about Communism at Vatican II. Thus, the
same Orthodox prelate who betrayed the Orthodox Church was instrumental in an
agreement by which the Catholic Church was also betrayed. At Vatican II
certain Catholic churchmen, cooperating with Nikodim, agreed that the
Catholic Church, too, would become a Church of Silence.

And since the Council,
the Catholic Church has almost everywhere unquestionably fallen silent not only
as to the errors of Communismwhich the Church has almost completely
ceased condemning, even in Red China, which viciously persecutes the
Churchbut also as to the errors of the world at large. We recall that in
his opening address to the Council, Pope John freely admitted that the Council
(and most of the Church after him) would no longer condemn errors but would
open Herself to the world in a "positive" presentation of Her teaching to "men
of good will." What followed, as Pope Paul VI himself admitted, was not the
hoped-for conversion of "men of good will" but what Paul VI himself called "a
veritable invasion of the Church by worldly thinking." In other words, to the
extent that this is possible in the Catholic Church (which can never completely
fail in Her mission), there has been a kind of Sergian Adaptation of Roman
Catholicism.

Now, in keeping with
this Adaptation of the Catholic Church, by the year 2000 the Message of Fatima
had been firmly subjugated to the demands of the new orientation. It had
already been determined by certain members of the Vatican apparatus that Russia
was not to be mentioned in any consecration ceremony the Pope might undertake
in response to the Virgins requests. In the November 2000 issue of
Inside the Vatican, a leading Cardinal, identified only as "one of the
Popes closest advisors," is quoted to the effect that "Rome fears the
Russian Orthodox might regard it as an offense if Rome were to make
specific mention of Russia in such a prayer, as if Russia especially is in need
of help when the whole world, including the post-Christian West, faces profound
problems ..." The same Cardinal-advisor added: "Let us beware of becoming too
literal-minded."

In other words,
"Rome"meaning a few members of the Vatican apparatus who advise the
Popehas decided not to honor the specific request of Our Lady of Fatima
for fear of giving offense to the Russian Orthodox. "Rome" does not wish to
give the impression that Russia should be converted to the Catholic Faith
through its consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for this would be
quite contrary to the new "ecumenical dialogue" launched by Vatican II. The
consecration and conversion of Russia called for by the Mother of God would
also be contrary to the Vaticans diplomatic agreement (in the 1993
Balamand Declaration) that the return of the Orthodox to Rome is "outdated
ecclesiology"a claim that, as we have shown, flatly contradicts the
infallibly defined Catholic dogma that heretics and schismatics cannot be saved
outside the Catholic Church. In keeping with this blatant departure from
Catholic teaching, the Vaticans own apostolic administrator for Russia,
Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, stated publicly in January of 1998 that "The
Second Vatican Council has declared that the Orthodox Church is our Sister
Church and has the same means for salvation. So there is no reason to have a
policy of proselytism."3

Given this de
facto abandonment of the Churchs constant teaching that heretics,
schismatics, Jews and pagans must be added to the Catholic flock if they are to
be saved, a consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart to bring about the
conversion of Russia would, of course, be out of the questionat least so
far as those who promote the new orientation of the Church are concerned.

Thus, on May 13, 1982
and again on March 25, 1984, the Pope had consecrated the world to the
Immaculate Heart, but with no mention of Russia. In neither case had the
bishops of the world participated. Thus, neither of the two requirements
attested to by Sister Lucy throughout her life had been met. Clearly
recognizing this, the Pope himself had made telltale remarks during and after
the 1984 ceremony. During the ceremony, before 250,000 people in Saint
Peters Square, he spontaneously added to the prepared text the following:
"Enlighten especially the peoples of which You Yourself are awaiting our
consecration and confiding."4 Hours after the ceremony, as reported
in the Italian Catholic bishops newspaper Avvenire, the Holy
Father prayed inside St. Peters, before 10,000 witnesses, asking Our Lady
to bless "those peoples for whom You Yourself are awaiting our act of
consecration and entrusting."5 Russia has not been consecrated to
the Immaculate Heart, and the Pope knows it. Evidently persuaded by his
advisers, the Pope had told Bishop Cordes, head of the Pontifical Council of
the Laity, that he had omitted any mention of Russia because "it would be
interpreted as a provocation by the Soviet leaders."6

The Emergence of the "Party Line" on
Fatima

But the faithful would
not simply abandon the Consecration of Russia, for it was obvious that during
the period 1984-2000 Russia had failed to experience the religious conversion
the Virgin had promised as the fruit of a proper consecration to the Immaculate
Heart. Quite the contrary, despite certain political changes, Russias
spiritual, moral and material condition had only deteriorated since the
"consecration" of 1984.

Consider these proofs,
which provide only a sketch of the gravity of Russias situation as of the
year 2000 (and it has only become worse since then, as we shall see):

Some 16 years after the Consecration, Russia has the highest
abortion rate in the world. Fr. Daniel Maurer, CJD, who spent the last eight
years in Russia, says that statistically, the average Russian woman will have
eight abortions in her childbearing yearsthough Fr. Maurer believes the
actual number is about 12 abortions per woman. He has spoken to women who have
had as many as 25 abortions. A major reason for these dreadful figures is that
other contraception methods (which are immoral anyway) have not been introduced
in Russia, nor are they trusted. This leaves abortion as the "cheapest way to
limit the family size". Presently in Russia, abortions are free, but births
are not.7

The Russian birth rate is plummeting and Russias
population is dropping at the rate of 700,000 people each yearan
unprecedented event in a civilized nation during "peacetime."8

Russia has the highest alcohol consumption in the
world.9

Satanism, occultism and witchcraft are on the rise in
Russia, as even the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Alexy II, publicly
admits.10

Homosexuality is rampant in Moscow and throughout the
country. In fact, in April 1993, nine years after the 1984 "consecration",
Boris Yeltsin had allowed homosexuality to be de-criminalized. Homosexuality is
now "legal" in Russia.11

Russia is a leading world center for the distribution of
child pornography. The Associated Press reported on a Moscow-based child
pornography ring linked to another child pornography ring in Texas. To quote
AP: "Russian law does not distinguish between child pornography and pornography
involving adults, and treats the production and distribution of either as a
minor crime, said Dmitry Chepchugov, head of the Russian Interior Ministry's
department for high technology crimes. Russian police often complain about the
legal chaos that has turned Russia into an international center of child
pornography production. 'Unfortunately, Russia has turned into a world
trash bin of child pornography,'Chepchugov told reporters in
Moscow."12

Russians now avidly watch "reality-based" TV. On the most
vile "reality-based" shows, cameras film the intimate personal lives of Russian
"couples," including their sexual activity. Despite grumbles of disapproval
from old hard-line Communists, Russian viewers "cannot get enough" of this
pornography. The program "boasts an audience share of more than 50% and
thousands of Russians have endured sub-zero temperatures and queued for more
than an hour to catch a glimpse of it through a window of the flat. Millions
have logged on to the website, which has crashed frequently under the weight of
traffic."13

As for the standing of the Catholic Church, in 1997 Russia
enacted a new law on "freedom of conscience" which gave privileged status to
Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism as Russias "traditional
religions," while requiring Catholic parishes to obtain approval from local
bureaucrats for their very existence. As a result:

The miniscule Catholic priesthood in Russia, some 200
priests, consists almost entirely of foreign-born clerics many of whom are
given only three-month entry visas, while businessmen receive six-month
visas.14

There are a mere ten Russian-born priests in the whole
countryfive in Siberia and five in Kazakhstan. Ninety-five percent of the
priests and nuns in Russia are foreign born. In Archbishop Bukovskys
frank opinion the Catholic Church "is small ... and will always be
small."15

Catholics comprise less than one-half of one percent of the
Russian population, and Russian Muslims outnumber Catholics by more than
10-to-1. According to a report by Radio Free Europe, in Russia Catholicism is
seen as "a kind of unexplainable eccentricity  why should a Russian be
Catholic?"16

According to the Vatican, there are 500,000 Catholics in
Russia, and most of these are in Siberia, where Stalin sent their
grandparents.17

Given this kind of
evidence, the question whether the Consecration of Russia had been done in the
manner requested by Our Lady of Fatima was simply not going to go away.
Therefore, from the perspective of the executors of the Churchs new
orientationthe Churchs Adaptation to the worldsomething had
to be done about Fatima. And, in particular, something had to be done about a
Canadian priest by the name of Father Nicholas Gruner, whose Fatima apostolate
had become a sounding board for millions of Catholics who were convinced that
the Consecration of Russia had been derailed by the plans of certain men in the
Vatican. Quite simply, Fatima and "the Fatima priest" had to be buried once and
for all.

The process began as
early as 1988, when, Frère François recounts: "[A]n order came
from the Vatican addressed to the authorities of Fatima, to Sister Lucy, to
diverse ecclesiastics, including Father Messias Coelho, and a French priest
[evidently Father Pierre Caillon] very much devoted to Our Lady, ordering
everyone to cease pestering the Holy Father with the Consecration of Russia."
Fatima devotee Father Caillon confirmed the issuance of this order: "An order
came from Rome, obliging everyone to say and think: The Consecration is
done. The Pope having done all that he can, Heaven has deigned to agree to this
gesture."18 It was around this time, 1988-1989, that many
Fatima Apostolates who had maintained that the consecration of Russia had not
been done suddenly reversed themselves and declared that the 1984 consecration
fulfilled the desires of Heaven. Sadly, even Father Caillon soon afterwards
changed his testimony and began to say that the 1984 Consecration had fulfilled
the Virgins requests.

It was also at this
time that typewritten and computer-generated letters, purportedly from Sister
Lucy, began to circulate. Typical of the manifestly incredible letters was the
one dated November 8, 1989, to a Mr. Noelker, which contains the statement by
"Sister Lucy" that Pope Paul VI consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart
during his brief visit to Fatima in 1967a consecration that never
happened, as Sister Lucy certainly knew because she witnessed the entire
visit.19

Thus emerged the
Party Line on the Message of Fatima. What, precisely, do we mean by "the
Party Line"? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin once said: "The lie is sacred and deception
will be our principal weapon." Thus it was no surprise that Pravda, when
it was the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party, was filled with lies,
even though the Russian word Pravda means "truth." A newspaper whose
name is "truth" was always filled with lies, because, as Lenin said, "the lie
is sacred and deception will be our principal weapon".

Now, a liar will not
convince anyone of his lies if he wears a big placard on his chest that says
"Liar!" Not even a fool would believe such a man. For the liar to convince
people that his lies are truth, the truth must be redefined. This is
what is meant by Lenins phrase "the lie is sacred " The lie becomes
the "truth" and is slavishly adhered to in place of the truth. As Scripture
says, pronouncing the curse in the book of Isaias, "Woe to you that call evil
good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for
darkness". (Is. 5:20) The darkness of falsehood is given the appearance of the
light of truth, and this is one of the principal errors of Russia.

But this trick of
turning a lie into the "truth" did not originate with Russia, or with the
Communists; it originated with the devil, who is the Father of Lies. St. Paul
speaks of the devil under the guise of the angel of light. To be more specific,
he refers to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: "But though we, or an angel
from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you,
let him be anathema." (Gal. 1:8) It is the devil, appearing under the guise of
an angel of light, who gives the appearance of truth in order to deceive by
means of the lie. This is where the error "the lie is sacred" and "falsehood is
truth" originated.

Father Paul Kramer
relates a conversation he had with General Daniel Graham, a general in the US
Army. "General Graham said that he had once been in Russia with a Soviet
official and the Soviet official asked him, Dont you want
peace? And the General answered: No! Because I know how you define
peace. I do not want that kind of peace. As they were conversing, they
drove by a huge billboard that showed soldiers with their rifles. On the
billboard was the caption: Pobieda kommunista eta mir. Which is, in
English, Communist Victory is Peace."

According to Marxist
teaching, the Communist State wages war to make revolution and uses every
possible means of deceptiontotal warin order to subjugate the
entire world to Communism. And once total war has been waged and Communism is
victorious over the entire planet, then there is the Communist version of
"peace". But what is peace in reality? It is best defined by St.
Augustine: "Peace is the tranquillity of order." Which definition is correct?
It is not a matter of subjective evaluation. St. Thomas Aquinas explains:
"ens et verum convertunter",which is a scholastic way of saying
that truth is convertible with reality. That which is objectively real
is, for that very reason, objectively true. In other words, truth is
that which is, whereas a lie is that which is not. That which
is not cannot be true. Therefore, if someone declares, for example, that
white is black, the claim that white is black is a lieno matter how high
the authority of the one making the claim.

According to Marxist
doctrine, however, truth is that which promotes the Communist
revolution. And what is it that promotes the Communist revolution? It is
whatever has been decided to be the Party Line. What the Party dictates to
be true becomes the "truth" even if, in reality, it is a lie. Thus, if the
Party Line is that black is white, then that is what all Party members must
believe, simply because it has been decided by the Party that black is white.

Just as there has been
a kind of "Stalinization" of the Church, in the sense of an Adaptation of the
Church to the world, so also must there be a kind of Stalinist Party Line on
Fatimaa version of Fatima dictated from on high to which all the members
of the Church of the post-conciliar Adaptation must adhere. In essence, the
Party Line on Fatima comes down to this: The "Consecration of Russia" is over
and done with, and everyone must cease asking for it. We have "peace" as
predicted by Our Lady of Fatima. Russia is undergoing the "conversion" Our Lady
promised. Thereforeso the Party Line goesnothing in the Message of
Fatima remains to be accomplished, and Fatima now belongs to the past.

As we shall see, all
of the terms in quotation marks"consecration of Russia", "peace" and
"conversion"have been redefined to accommodate the Party Line on Fatima.
Where Fatima is concerned, we are now being asked to believe the equivalent of
"black is white," for that is the Party Line.

The Dictatorship of the Vatican Secretary of
State

Now every Party Line
requires a dictator, a head of the Party, to impose it. From where, exactly,
within the Vatican apparatus did the Party Line on Fatima originate? The
evidence is overwhelming that it originated with the Vatican Secretary of
State. On this point some brief background is in order.

First of all, in the
proper state of thingswhat St. Augustine called "the tranquillity of
order" or peacethe Church is not a dictatorship. Dictatorship is a
barbaric institution. As Euripides says "among the barbarians all are slaves
but one." Our Lord said "the princes of the Gentiles lord it over" their
subjects. (Mt. 20:25) He said to His apostles "with you it is not to be this
way." Yet the tranquillity of orderthe peace of the Churchhas been
disturbed enormously in the post-conciliar period. What we see in the Church
today is that the hierarchs of the Roman Curia (not the Pope, but a few
of his Vatican ministers) lord it over their subjects with an oriental
despotism. To be more precise, they lord it over certain subjects, who
buck the Party Line, while the Church at large suffers from a near-collapse of
faith and discipline which these same potentates ignore.

How did this come to
pass? Since the restructuring of the Roman Curia, around 1967, by order of Pope
Paul VIwhich was actually designed and carried out by Cardinal Jean
Villotthe heads of the various Roman dicasteries have been able to behave
like dictators. Before the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Curia was
structured as a monarchy. The Pope was the Prefect of the Holy Office, while
the Cardinal in charge of the day-to-day business of the Holy Office was the
second-in-command. The other dicasteries were of lower rank. And while having
their own authority and jurisdiction, again in accordance with that principle
of subsidiarity,20 they were subordinate to the Holy Office, and the
Holy Office was directly under the Pope. This arrangement was entirely in
keeping with the Divine Constitution of the Church. The Pope, the Vicar of
Jesus Christ on earth, was at the head of the chain of command.

But after Vatican II,
Cardinal Villot engineered the restructuring of the Roman Curia. Long before
Gorbachev announced his program of perestroika in the Soviet Union, the
Church underwent its own perestroika in the Roman Curia. The Holy Office
was renamedbut far more significant, the Holy Office lost its supreme
position in the Curia. The Curia was restructured in such a manner that the
Cardinal Secretary of State was placed over all the other dicasteries,
including the former Holy Office. Renamed and restructured, it was now called
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and the Pope was no
longer the Prefect. But it (the CDF) is now under a Cardinal Prefect (today it
is Cardinal Ratzinger) and he is under the authority of the Secretary of
State.

According to the
previous arrangement under the Pope and his Holy Office, faith and morals were
the preeminent factors determining curial policies. In the post-conciliar
arrangement, however, under the Cardinal Secretary of State and his dicastery,
the Secretariat of State, it is the Party Linethe politics of the
Secretary of Statethat is the supreme determining factor in the
formulation of Church policies. Even the former Holy Office, now the CDF, is
subordinate to the Secretary of State. As a result of this restructuring, the
Holy Father, the Supreme Pontiff, is reduced to a figurehead who gives his
approval, as a rubber stamp, to rulings presented to him as a fait
accompli by the Secretary of State. This bears repeating: The Pope has
been reduced to a figurehead in the service of the dictatorship of the
Secretary of State.21

In the Masonic
registry required by Italian law, one did find the name of Jean Villotthe
same Villot who oversaw the curial reorganization. After Cardinal Villot died,
in his private library was found a handwritten message from the Grand Master of
Villots Masonic Lodge, praising Villot for upholding Masonic
traditions.22 As a French priest living in Rome said: "At least in
one area he was traditional."

The Use of False "Obedience" to Impose the
Party Line

In 1917, the very year
Our Lady appeared at Fatima, Saint Maximilian Kolbe was in Rome, where he saw
the Masons showing their open hostility to the Catholic Church and carrying
placards announcing their intention to infiltrate the Vatican so that satan
would rule from the Vatican and the Pope would be his slave.23 They
also boasted at the same time that they would destroy the Church. The intention
of the Masons to destroy the Church fits in perfectly with the well-known
Masonic dictum, "We will destroy the Church by means of holy obedience."
As we showed in an earlier chapter, Bishop Graber of Regensburg, Germany,
collected other such testimonies of Masonic luminaries, and the Permanent
Instruction of the Alta Vendita itself boldly declared "let the Clergy
march under your standard, always believing that they are marching under the
banner of the apostolic keys." That is, the demand for "obedience" would be
used in dictatorial fashion to undermine true obedience and the faith itself.

And the curial
reorganization of 1967 would be instrumental in accomplishing that aim by
subjecting the whole Church to the Party Line of the Secretary of
Stateincluding the Party Line on Fatimaunder the guise of a false
"obedience" to an authority who has clearly exceeded the bounds established by
God Himself. As we will demonstrate shortly, it was Cardinal Sodano who
literally dictated the "interpretation" of the visional aspect of the Third
Secret of Fatima, which has been published without the Virgins own words
to explain it.

The Secretary of State Targets the Message of
Fatima

This brings us to the
precise role of the Secretary of State in imposing the Party Line with respect
to Fatima. As we have noted, this process would involve the Message of Fatima
in general and, in particular, perhaps its foremost proponent in the Church:
the Fatima apostolate of Father Nicholas Gruner.

As early as 1989, the
Secretary of State at the time, Cardinal Casaroli (the great "architect" of
Ostpolitik) had communicated to Father Gruners bishop at the time,
His Excellency Gerardo Pierro of the Diocese of Avellino, Italy, what the
Bishop had called "worried signals" about Father Gruners Fatima
apostolate. Father Gruner had been ordained in Avellino in 1976 for a
Franciscan community that did not form as expected. Since 1978 he had been
residing in Canada with the Bishops permission, where he had become the
leader of a small Fatima apostolate that had since grown into the largest of
its kind in the world. But after the Party Line concerning the "consecration"
of 1984 had been imposed by the anonymous order of 1988, it was inevitable that
Father Gruners apostolate and the Secretary of State would
collidejust as the traditional orientation and the new orientation of the
Church have collided after Vatican II.

The basic technique
for trying to get rid of Father Gruner had been to create a bogus canonical
scenario in which, having been ordered to find some other bishop to incardinate
him outside of Avellino, Father Gruners incardination anywhere else would
be blocked through unprecedented arm-twisting behind the scenes, so that Father
Gruner would be forced to "return" to Avellino and abandon his apostolate.
Having blocked Father Gruners incardination by three successive
benevolent bishops who were friends of Fatima, the Vatican apparatus (in a
complex proceeding beyond the scope of this book24) had finally
lowered the boom: Father Gruner must "return" to Avellino or be "suspended" for
"disobedience." In essence, Father Gruner was under a threat of "suspension"
for having failed to do what his very accusers had systematically prevented him
from doingnamely, find another bishop to incardinate
him.25

As Father
Gruners various canonical appeals from these unprecedented actions
against him wended their way through Vatican tribunals, his Fatima apostolate
continued to flourish. By the year 2000 the apostolate, particularly through
its journal The Fatima Crusader,had become the strongest and
most persistent voice in the Church for both the Consecration of Russia and
disclosure of the Third Secret.

Furthermore, the Pope
himself had complicated the Fatima picture with his decision to beatify Jacinta
and Francisco in a ceremony at Fatima on May 13, 2000. His intention to beatify
the two children was made known as early as June of 1999, and this development
had clearly triggered an internal struggle within the Vatican apparatus. This
is shown by the curious on-again, off-again nature of the beatification
ceremony, which is most unusual for the Vatican. First, the Secretary of State,
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, announced in October 1999 that the beatification of
Jacinta and Francisco would take place on April 9, 2000 in St. Peters
Square, along with four other beatifications. The Patriarch of Lisbon is quoted
in the Portuguese press as having been informed by the Vatican that it was
"quite impossible" for the Pope to come to Fatima for the childrens
beatification and that the question was "closed." The Patriarch told Portuguese
journalists that he was convinced this "impossibility" of the Pope coming to
Fatima was exclusively due to a decision by none other than the Vatican
Secretary of State.

But the Pope had other
ideas. In November of 1999 His Holinessobviously bypassing Cardinal
Sodanoinformed Bishop Serafim, the Bishop of Fatima, directly that he
should announce that the Pope would indeed come to Fatima on May 13 to perform
the beatifications. Bishop Serafim did not make the new announcement until
December 1999. And then, in March of 2000, the Bishop also let it slip that
"the Pope will do something special for Fatima." This prompted furious
speculation in the press that the Pope was, at last, going to reveal the Third
Secret. Bishop Serafim was immediately rebuked in public by the Cardinal
Patriarch of Lisbon, possibly under orders from somebody in the employ of the
Vatican Secretary of State, who did not wish anyone to know that the Pope was
contemplating revelation of the Secret. But the proverbial cat was out of the
proverbial bag.26

And so the Pope went
to Fatima on May 13, 2000 to beatify Jacinta and Francisco. The papal
appearance was a kind of living demonstration of the conflict between the two
visions of the Church we have been discussing. Evoking the Church of all time,
the Pope delivered a sermon after the beatifications. In this sermon many
things the Church seemed to have forgotten over the past forty years were
suddenly recalled again:

According to the
divine plan, "a woman clothed with the sun" (Apoc. 12:1) came down from
Heaven to this earth to visit the privileged children of the Father. She speaks
to them with a mothers voice and heart: She asks them to offer
themselves as victims of reparation, saying that She was ready to lead them
safely to God.

Later Francisco, one
of the three privileged children, exclaimed: "We were burning in that
light which is God and we were not consumed. What is God like? It is impossible
to say. In fact we will never be able to tell people". God: a light that
burns without consuming. Moses had the same experience when he saw God in
the burning bush.

"Another portent
appeared in Heaven; behold, a great red dragon" (Apoc. 12:3). These words from
the first reading of the Mass make us think of the great struggle between good
and evil, showing how, when man puts God aside, he cannot achieve happiness,
but ends up destroying himself.

The Message of
Fatima is a call to conversion, alerting humanity to have nothing to do
with the "dragon" whose "tail swept down a third of the stars of
Heaven, and cast them to the earth" (Apoc. 12:4).

Mans final
goal is Heaven, his true home, where the heavenly Father awaits everyone with
His merciful love. God does not want anyone to be lost; that is why 2,000 years
ago He sent His Son to earth, "to seek and to save the lost" (Lk.
19:10).

In Her motherly
concern, the Blessed Virgin came here to Fatima to ask men and women "to stop
offending God, Our Lord, who is already too much offended". It is a
mothers sorrow that compels Her to speak; the destiny of Her children
is at stake. For this reason She asks the little shepherds: "Pray,
pray much and make sacrifices for sinners; many souls go to hell because
they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them".

The Popes direct
linkage of the Message of Fatima with the Book of the Apocalypse, and his
likening of the Fatima seers encounter with God to that of Moses before
the Burning Bush, comprised a stunning papal authentication of the Fatima
apparitions as divinely given prophecies for our time. All of a sudden, Fatima
was squarely before the eyes of the whole Church again.

There was, first of
all, the Popes astonishing reference to the Message of Fatima as a
Biblical moment, the very fulfillment of chapter 12, verse 1 of the Apocalypse,
which speaks of the "Woman clothed with the sun." Here Pope John Paul II echoed
Pope Paul VI, who, in his apostolic letter Signum magnum, delivered at
Fatima on May 13, 1967, declared:

The great sign which
the Apostle John saw in Heaven, "a woman clothed with the sun," is interpreted
by the sacred Liturgy, not without foundation, as referring to the most Blessed
Mary, the mother of all men by the grace of Christ the Redeemer. On the
occasion of the religious ceremonies which are taking place at this time in
honor of the Virgin Mother of God in Fatima, Portugal, where She is venerated
by countless numbers of the faithful for Her motherly and compassionate heart,
we wish to call the attention of all sons of the Church once more to the
indissoluble link between the spiritual motherhood of Mary and the
duties of redeemed men toward Her, the Mother of the Church.

Even more astonishing,
in his sermon Pope John Paul II had explicitly linked the Message of Fatima to
Apocalypse, chapter 12, verse 4, which prophesies that the "tail of the dragon"
will sweep one-third of the stars from Heaven and cast them down to the earth.
As Father Gruner would later note: "In the language of the Bible, the
stars of Heaven are those who are set in the heavens to illumine
the way for others to go to Heaven. This passage has been classically
interpreted in Catholic commentaries to mean that one-third of the
clergyi.e. Cardinals, bishops, priestsfall from their consecrated
state and are actually working for the devil." For example, the Haydock
Commentary to the Douay-Rheims Bible notes that the image of
one-third of the stars of Heaven has been interpreted to refer to "bishops and
eminent persons who fall under the weight of persecution and apostatized
The devil is always ready, as far as God permits him, to make war against the
Church and the faithful servants of God."

In this connection
Father Gruner, Gerry Mataticsthe Catholic Biblical scholar (and former
Presbyterian minister)and others have cited the commentary on Apoc.
12:3-4 by Father Herman B. Kramer, in The Book of Destiny. This work was
published with an imprimatur, providentially enough, in 1956, only six
years before the opening of Vatican II. In reference to the symbol of one-third
of the stars of Heaven, Father Herman Kramer notes: "This is one-third of the
clergy" and that "one-third of the stars shall follow the
dragon"meaning one-third of the clergy, who are the "stars", the
consecrated souls in the Church.27 That is, one-third of the
Catholic clergy will be in the service of the devil, working to destroy the
Church from within. Father Herman Kramers commentary points out that the
red dragona sign of the devil which could also symbolize Communism
because red is Communisms emblematic colorbrings the Church into
great distress by undermining it from within.

The commentary goes on
to say that, by means of these apostate clergy, the devil will probably enforce
upon the Church "the acceptance of unchristian morals, false doctrines,
compromise with error, or obedience to the civil rulers in violation of
conscience." In addition, he suggests that "The symbolic meaning of the
dragons tail may reveal that the clergy who are ripe for apostasy will
hold the influential positions in the Church, having won preferment by
hypocrisy, deceit and flattery." The clergy who will follow the dragon 
i.e. the devil  would include those "who neglected to preach the truth or
to admonish the sinner by a good example, but rather sought popularity by being
lax and the slaves of human respect," as well as those "who fear for their own
interests and will not remonstrate against evil practices in the Church" and
bishops "who abhor upright priests who dare to tell the truth".28
Father Herman Kramer also observes as follows concerning the state of the
Catholic Church in the times prophesied by Apoc. 12:3-4:

"The apostolic
democracy founded by Our Lord may have given way to an absolute monarchy, in
which the episcopate rules with oriental despotism. The priests may be reduced
to a state of servility and fawning sycophancy. The rule by reason, justice and
love may have been supplanted by the absolute will of the bishop, whose every
act and word are to be accepted without question, without recourse to fact,
truth or justice. Conscience may have lost its right to guide the actions of
the priests and may stand ignored or condemned. Diplomacy, expediency and other
trickery may be upheld as the greatest
virtues."29

But none of this is
mentioned in those parts of the Message of Fatima which have thus far been
revealed. Had the Pope, then, with his startling reference to Apocalypse
12:3-4, just given the world a glimpse into the contents of the Third Secret?
Would he now reveal the Secret in its entirety?

But, alas, the sermon
ends. It is not the Pope who will discuss the Third Secret. As quickly as it
began, the Popes momentary return to the vision of the Church of all time
is over, and a chief exponent of the new vision rises to his feet. It is
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of Statethe same Cardinal
Sodano who had tried, but failed, to prevent the Pope from going to Fatima to
beatify Jacinta and Francisco. For some strange reason it is Sodano, not the
Pope, who will announce that the Pope has decided to reveal the Third Secret of
Fatima:

On the solemn
occasion of his visit to Fatima, His Holiness has directed me to make an
announcement to you. As you know, the purpose of his visit to Fatima has been
to beatify the two "little shepherds". Nevertheless he also wishes his
pilgrimage to be a renewed gesture of gratitude to Our Lady for Her protection
during these years of his papacy. This protection seems also to be linked to
the so-called "third part" of the secret of Fatima.

And then what had
seemed so strange suddenly became quite explicable. Cardinal Sodanos task
would be to prepare the faithful to accept the notion that the Message of
Fatima, including the Third Secret, was now to be considered a thing of the
past. The process would begin with the Cardinals "interpretation" of the
Third Secret:

That text contains a
prophetic vision similar to those found in Sacred Scripture, which do not
describe with photographic clarity the details of future events, but rather
synthesize and condense against a unified background of events spread out over
time in a succession and a duration which are not specified. As a result, the
text must be interpreted in a symbolic key.

According to the
interpretation of the "little shepherds", which was also recently confirmed by
Sister Lucia, the "Bishop clothed in white" who prays for all the faithful is
the Pope. As he makes his way with great effort towards the Cross amid the
corpses of those who were martyred (bishops, priests, men and women religious
and many lay persons), he too falls to the ground, apparently dead,
under a burst of gunfire.

As the faithful will
soon learn, this is simply a lie. The "Bishop dressed in White" in the vision
is not "apparently dead" but is killedas the text of the vision
clearly statesin the manner of a military execution, along with many
bishops, priests and religious, outside a half-ruined city.

After the
assassination attempt of 13 May 1981, it appeared evident to His Holiness that
it was "a motherly hand which guided the bullets path", enabling the
"dying Pope" to halt "at the threshold of death".

The successive
events of 1989 led, both in the Soviet Union and in a number of countries of
Eastern Europe, to the fall of the Communist regime which promoted atheism.

Even if the events
to which the third part of the Secret of Fatima refers now seem part of the
past, Our Ladys call to conversion and penance, issued at the
beginning of the Twentieth Century, remains timely and urgent today.

Quite simply, Sodano
was preparing the way for an "interpretation" of the Message of Fatima that
would bury it once and for all: the Message culminated with the 1981
assassination attempt and the "fall of Communism" in 1989events which
"now seem part of the past." To insure this result, a "commentary" would be
prepared before the actual text of the Third Secret would be released:

In order that the
faithful may better receive the message of Our Lady of Fatima, the Pope has
charged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with making public the
third part of the secret, after the preparation of an appropriate
commentary.

But why had this
commentary not been ready in time for the May 13 ceremony? After all, news of
the Third Secrets impending disclosure had been circulating since at
least March of 2000. In that month, Bishop Serafim had announced that the Pope
had told him during a visit to Rome that the Pope would "do something special
for Fatima"30 when he went there for the beatification ceremony in
May 2000.

Curiously enough, the
Pope had urged Bishop Serafim to say nothing about this while he was in Rome,
but to wait until he returned to Fatima. But the subject was on the Popes
mind since the previous November, so why had no "commentary" been prepared
during the period November 1999 to May 2000? Surely, such a commentary could
easily have been completed in that time.

Two conclusions
suggest themselves. Either the Pope had not told Cardinal Sodano of his
intention concerning disclosure of the Third Secretin which case the Pope
does not trust Sodanoor the Pope did tell Sodano, whereupon Sodano
assumed that he would somehow be able to prevent disclosure at the May 13, 2000
ceremony. This would explain why Sodano had not arranged for a commentary
beforehand: he thought it would not be needed because he would be able to
prevent any disclosure of the Third Secret. But the Pope had pressed ahead, and
now the Secret had to be "managed" in such a way that the question of Fatima
could be laid to rest.

A Press Conference to Announce the Sodano
Party Line

We thus arrive at the
fateful date of June 26, 2000. On this date the Third Secret is "disclosed" at
a Vatican press conference, along with a commentary prepared by Cardinal
Ratzinger and Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary of the CDF, entitled The
Message of Fatima (hereafter referred to as TMF). In TMF the
Party Line on Fatima would be officially promulgatedby the direct command
of Cardinal Angelo Sodano.

First of all, the
faithful were told that the following text of a vision seen by Sister Lucy is
all there is to the Third Secret of Fatima:

After the two parts
which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we
saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out
flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died
out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her
right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a
loud voice: Penance, Penance, Penance!. And we saw in an immense
light that is God: something similar to how people appear in a mirror
when they pass in front of it a Bishop dressed in White we had the
impression that it was the Holy Father. Other Bishops, Priests, men and
women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big
Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching
there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half
trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the
souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain,
on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers
who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after
another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay
people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross
there were two Angels, each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which
they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that
were making their way to God.

The immediate reaction
of millions of Catholics could be summarized in two words: Thats
it? Clearly, something was amiss, since nothing in this text corresponded
to what Cardinal Ratzinger himself had said about the Third Secret in
1984a point to which we shall return shortly. Nor did it contain anything
that would have explained its mysterious suppression since 1960.

Most important, this
obscure vision, written down on four sheets of notebook paper, contained no
words of Our Lady. In particular, it contained nothing that would complete the
famous phrase spoken by Our Lady at the conclusion of the recorded portion of
the Message of Fatima as faithfully transcribed by Sister Lucy in her memoirs:
"In Portugal the dogma of the faith will always be preserved etc." Sister Lucy
had added this phrase, including the "etc.", to her fourth memoir as part of
the integral text of the Message. This addition had led every reputable Fatima
scholar to conclude that it signaled the beginning of the unrecorded Third
Secret, and that the Third Secret pertained to a widespread dogmatic crisis in
the Church outside of Portugal. Clearly, the Virgin had more to say that was
not written down because Sister Lucy had been instructed to keep it
secretuntil, as we have seen, 1960.

In a curious maneuver,
however, TMF had avoided any discussion of the telltale phrase by taking
the text of the Message of Fatima from Sister Lucys third memoir,
where the phrase does not appear. TMF justifies this as follows: "For
the account of the first two parts of the secret, which have
already been published and are therefore known, we have chosen the text written
by Sister Lucia in the Third Memoir of 31 August 1941; some
annotations were added in the Fourth Memoir of 8 December 1941."
Annotations? The key phrase concerning the preservation of dogma in Portugal
was no "annotation" but an integral part of the spoken words of Our
Lady, after which She had said: "Tell this to no one. Yes, you may tell
Francisco."

Having deceptively
mischaracterized an integral part of the Message of Fatima as an "annotation",
TMF then buries it in a footnote that is never mentioned again: "In the
Fourth Memoir Sister Lucia adds: In Portugal, the dogma of
the faith will always be preserved, etc. ...."

Why are
Sodano/Ratzinger/Bertone so leery of this key phrase that they would so
obviously go out of their way to avoid it by using an earlier and less
complete memoir of the text of the Message? If there is nothing to hide in
this phrase, why not simply use the Fourth Memoir and attempt an explanation of
what the phrase means? Why did the authors of TMF so obviously
pretend that the phrase is a mere "annotation", when they know full well
that it appears in the integral text as part of the spoken words of the Mother
of God? We shall return to this suspicious behavior in a later chapter.

Another grounds for
suspicion was that the vision of the "Bishop dressed in White" was not at all
the one-page "letter in which Sister Lucy wrote down the words
which Our Lady confidedas a secret to the three shepherds of the
Cova da Iria"as the Vatican itself had described it in the aforementioned
1960 press release. The text of the vision spans four pages of what
appear to be ruled notebook paper.

Another suspicious
circumstance is that on June 26 Cardinal Sodanos falsehood of May 13 was
clearly exposed: the Pope is killed by soldiers who fire upon him as he
kneels at the foot of a large wooden Cross outside a half-ruined city. The Pope
is not "apparently dead", as Sodano had falsely asserted in May; the Pope
is dead. The vision, whatever it means, clearly has absolutely nothing
to do with the 1981 assassination attempt. The faithful had already been duped
in May, and now the process of duping them was clearly continuing.

The dozens of
discrepancies raised by this textprompting Catholics around the world to
doubt that we have received the Secret in its entiretywill be addressed
in a later chapter. For now, we consider the Ratzinger/Bertone "commentary" in
TMF on the Fatima Message as a whole.

Cardinal Sodano Dictates the "Interpretation"
of the Third Secret

First of all, TMF
is a virtual admission that the "interpretation" of the Message of Fatima
which Cardinal Ratzinger and Msgr. Bertone will "attempt" (to use Cardinal
Ratzingers word) has been dictated by none other than Cardinal Sodano. No
fewer than four times, TMF states that it is following
Sodanos "interpretation" of the Third Secretnamely, that
Fatima belongs to the past:

Before attempting an
interpretation, the main lines of which can be found in the statement read by
Cardinal Sodano on May 13 of this year

For this reason the
figurative language of the vision is symbolic. In this regard Cardinal
Sodano stated

As is clear from the
documentation presented here, the interpretation offered by Cardinal
Sodano, in his statement on 13 May, was first put personally to Sister
Lucia.

First of all, we
must affirm with Cardinal Sodano that the events to which the Third Secret
of Fatima refers now seem part of the past.

And just in case the
reader still has not gotten the point, the basic aim of TMF is driven
home once again:

Insofar as
individual events are described, they belong to the
past.

Is it not curious that
the interpretation of the Virgin of Fatimas vital message to the world
had been given over, not to the Pope, nor even to the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith (which was merely aping Cardinal Sodanos opinion),
but to the Vatican Secretary of State? What authority does Cardinal
Sodano have to impose his view upon the Church? None, of course. But Cardinal
Sodano had arrogated that authority to himself in keeping the overall
post-conciliar ascendancy of the Vatican Secretary of State to the status of
de facto Pope when it comes to the daily governance of Church
affairs.

Here it would be
opportune to provide another very telling example of this usurpation of
authority by the Secretary of State. In an article entitled "The Pope, the Mass
and the Politics of the Vatican Bureaucrats" (The Latin Mass magazine,
Winter Supplement, January 2002), Italian journalist Alessandro Zangrando
recounts an incident in which the Vatican Secretary of State blocked
publication in LOsservatore Romano of the Popes praise of
the traditional Latin Mass. The praise had been expressed in a papal message to
an assembly of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the
Sacraments: "In the Roman Missal of St. Pius V, as in many Eastern liturgies,
are very many beautiful prayers with which the priests express the most
profound sense of humility and reverence before the Holy Mysteries, the prayers
revealing the Substance Itself of each Liturgy."

Zangrando noted that
while papal messages to Vatican congregations are routinely published soon
after their release, this one was not. It was only after the Popes praise
of the traditional Mass was published in the secular Italian newspaper Il
Giornale that the Vatican Secretary of State suddenly (within 24 hours)
released the text of the Holy Fathers message through the Vatican Press
Officemore than a month after its issuance by the Pope. But to this day,
and contrary to normal practice, the Popes message to the Congregation
has not been published in LOsservatore Romano, the Popes own
newspaper. Zangrando quoted the conclusion of the renowned "Vaticanista"
(specialist in Vatican affairs) Andrea Tornielli: "The very fact that 24 hours
after the publication of the article [in Il Giornale] the Vatican
Secretariat of State made public the text of the Holy Fathers letter,
proves that a real attempt had been made at censoring the
Popes words... The operation backfired with unintended results"that
is, the Popes praise of the traditional Mass ended up gaining even wider
publicity in the secular press.

Here we see how
another key element of the Churchs new orientationthe abandonment
of Her traditional Latin liturgywas enforced by the Secretary of State,
who tried to censor the Popes praise for the traditional Mass. Who knows
how many other papal utterances have been censoredsuccessfullyby
the Vatican Secretariat of State? This incident is only typical of the way
Church governance operates today, especially given the Popes declining
physical health.

Cardinal Ratzinger Executes the Sodano Party
Line

Returning to the
"commentary" with these facts in mind, one can see that the press conference of
June 26, 2000 had one overriding purpose: to carry out Cardinal Sodanos
order concerning the "correct" interpretation of the Message of Fatima. By the
time the reporters left that room, the Message of Fatimaall of
itwas to be buried. And once buried, the Message would no longer impede
Cardinal Sodano and his collaborators in their relentless pursuit of the
Churchs new, post-Fatima orientation, which includes (as we shall see)
the important Church business of lauding, dining and hobnobbing at the Vatican
with the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, having the Pope apologize to the Red
Chinese regime, pressuring Romanian Catholics to surrender to the Orthodox
church the local Catholic Churchs rights to the properties stolen by
Josef Stalin, supporting and even contributing money to a godless,
unaccountable International Criminal Court under United Nations auspices that
could try Catholics of any nation for unspecified "crimes against humanity",
and other such "triumphs" of Vatican diplomacy.

In other words, every
last holdout in the Church must be brought along to the Vaticans new way
of thinking and speaking to the world, which does not square well with Our Lady
of Fatimas prophecy of the triumph of Her Immaculate Heart, the
spread of devotion to Her Immaculate Heart and the consequent
conversion of Russia through the intervention of the Immaculate Heart.
This sort of talk just wont do anymore, even if it does come from the
Mother of God. So, the precise task entrusted to Cardinal Ratzinger and Msgr.
Bertone on June 26 was to find a way to detach the faithful once and for all
from the explicitly Catholic aspects of the Message of Fatima, which all too
clearly remind us of the "triumphal" Church of the "pre-conciliar dark age". As
the Los AngelesTimes would observe in its headline of June 27,
2000: "Catholic Church Unveils Third Secret: The Vaticans Top Theologian
Gently Debunks a Nuns Account of Her 1917 Vision That Fueled Decades of
Speculation." The effort was so blatant that even a secular newspaper could not
help but notice it. Let us provide the proof of this crime against the Virgin
of Fatima and the saintly seers God chose to receive Her message.

First there was
Cardinal Ratzingers attempt in TMF to dispose of the
triumph of the Immaculate Heart:

I would like
finally to mention another key expression of the "secret" which has become
justly famous: "my Immaculate Heart will triumph". What does this mean? The
Heart open to God, purified by contemplation of God, is stronger than guns and
weapons of every kind. The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has
changed the history of the world, because it brought the Saviour into the
worldbecause, thanks to her Yes, God could become man in our world
and remains so for all time.

The attentive reader
will notice immediately that Cardinal Ratzinger has conveniently removed the
first three words from the Virgins prophecy: In the end. This
clearly deliberate censorship of the very Mother of God was necessary for
Cardinal Ratzingers revisionist "interpretation" along the lines dictated
by Sodano: namely, that Fatima belongs to the past.

Thus, "In the end,
My Immaculate Heart will triumph" isafter the expedient removal of
the first three wordsnow to be understood as follows: "2,000 years ago My
Immaculate Heart triumphed." Our Ladys prophecy of what will
happen in the end is blatantly falsified into a mere acknowledgment of
what had already happened 20 centuries ago at the beginning of Christian
history. Four future eventsthe triumph of the Immaculate Heart, the
consecration of Russia, Russias conversion, and the resulting period of
peace in the worldare cunningly converted into one event 2,000 years ago!

This tampering with a
message God Himself sent to earth through His Blessed Mother should cause any
member of the faithful to rise up and demand justice in the name of Heaven. But
Cardinal Ratzingers butchery of the Message of Fatima does not end here;
it is far worse than even this. Concerning Our Ladys call to establish
devotion to Her Immaculate Heart throughout the world as "God wishes,"
Cardinal Ratzinger offered this mockery:

According to
Matthew 5:8, the immaculate heart is a heart which, with Gods
grace, has come to perfect interior unity and therefore sees God.
To be devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means therefore to
embrace this attitude of heart, which makes the fiatyour will be
donethe defining centre of ones whole life.

Notice, first of all,
the quotation marks Cardinal Ratzinger places around devoted and
immaculate heart, which he strips of its upper-case Ia sure sign
these words are about to acquire a new meaning.

Thus, "God wishes to
establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart" is now to be understood
as: "God wishes everyone to do His will." In fact, everyone whose heart is open
to Gods will acquires an "immaculate heart" of his own. So, devotion to
the Immaculate Heart of Mary means opening ones own heart to God,
not spreading devotion to Her heart in order to make the world
(especially Russia) Catholic. Immaculate with a capital I becomes immaculate
with a lower-case i, and Her Heart becomes everyones heart, at least
potentially. As a magician would say: "Presto, change-o!"

There is, of course,
only one word to describe the demotion of the one and only Immaculate
Heartconceived without Original Sin and guilty of no personal sin
whatsoeverto the level of the heart of any person who turns away from his
sins and finds interior unity with God. The word is blasphemy. More will
be said about this particular outrage in the next chapter.

The conversion
of Russia was a bit more difficult to make disappear. There is not much one can
say to obscure the Mother of Gods very clear statement that "the Holy
Father will consecrate Russia to Me, which will be converted." But, as
we have demonstrated abundantly, the conversion of Russia is no longer
acceptable to the Vatican apparatus. The solution to this problem was simply to
avoid any discussion of the subject in TMF, although Our Ladys
words are quoted without comment. The conversion of Russia? What conversion?

The crowning insult
was Cardinal Ratzingers citation of only one "authority" on Fatima in
TMF: the Flemish theologian Edouard Dhanis, S.J., whom Cardinal
Ratzinger identifies as an "eminent scholar" on Fatima. Cardinal Ratzinger of
course knows that Dhanis, a modernist Jesuit, made a veritable career out of
casting doubt on the Fatima apparitions. Dhanis proposed that everything in the
Secret of Fatima beyond a call for prayer and penance was cobbled together in
the minds of the three children from things they had seen or heard in their own
lives. Dhanis thus categorized as "Fatima II" all those things which the
"eminent scholar" arbitrarily rejected as fabricationswithout ever once
interviewing Sister Lucy or studying the official Fatima archives.

As Dhanis put it:
"All things considered, it is not easy to state precisely what degree of
credence is to be given to the accounts of Sister Lucy. Without questioning her
sincerity, or the sound judgment she shows in daily life, one may judge it
prudent to use her writings only with reservations. Let us observe also
that a good person can be sincere and prove to have good judgment in everyday
life, but have a propensity for unconscious fabrication in a certain
area, or in any case, a tendency to relate old memories of twenty years ago
with embellishments and considerable modifications."31

Dhanis, who refused
to examine the official Fatima archives, cast doubt on every aspect of the
Message of Fatima which did not accord with his neo-modernist leanings: the
prayer taught by the Angel he called "inexact"; the vision of hell he called an
"exaggeratedly medieval representation"; the prophecy of "a night illumined by
an unknown light" heralding the advent of World War II he described as "grounds
for suspicion." And as for the consecration of Russia, Dhanis flatly declared
that: "Russia could not be consecrated by the Pope, without this act taking on
the air of a challenge, both in regard to the separated hierarchy, as well as
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This would make the consecration
practically unrealizable " Thus, Dhanis declared that the
consecration of Russia would be "morally impossible by reason of the reactions
it would normally provoke."32

Dhanis
deconstruction of the Message of Fatima is a typical example of how modernists
undermine Catholic truths based upon premises they themselves invent. Since
(invented premise) the consecration of Russia is morally impossible, how could
Our Lady of Fatima have requested it? Having thus stacked the deck against
Sister Lucy, Dhanis states the "inevitable" conclusion: "But could the Most
Holy Virgin have requested a consecration which, taken according to the rigor
of the terms, would be practically unrealizable? This question indeed
seems to call for a negative response. Thus, it hardly
seems probable that Our Lady asked for the consecration of Russia. "
Based entirely on the premise Dhanis invented, Sister Lucys testimony is
pronounced a fraud.

That is precisely the
line adopted by Cardinal Sodano and his Vatican apparatus: the Mother of God
could not possibly have requested anything as diplomatically embarrassing as a
public consecration of Russia: and so we must do away with this embarrassing
notion once and for all. And it is this line, the Party Line, that Cardinal
Ratzinger endorsed in his "commentary" by praising Dhanis as an "eminent
scholar" on Fatima. Cardinal Ratzinger, following the Party Line, suggests that
the Third Secret in particular consists of "images which Lucia may have seen in
devotional books and which draw their inspiration from long-standing intuitions
of faith." In other words, who can really say which parts of the Third Secret
are authentic and which are merely personal memories or "intuitions"? And if
that were true of the Third Secret, it would also be true of the rest of the
Message of Fatima.

Cardinal
Ratzingers stealthy attempt to undermine Sister Lucys credibility,
while professing great respect for the Message of Fatima, will be taken up
again in the following chapter. Here it suffices to say that Cardinal
Ratzingers evident agreement with Dhanis that all the specifically
prophetic elements of the Message are unreliable serves to disqualify him from
making any "interpretation" of the Third Secret, or any other part of the
Fatima Message. Quite simply, Cardinal Ratzinger does not believe that
the Mother of God called for the consecration of Russia, the conversion of
Russia to the Catholic Faith, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart, and the
establishment of the specifically Catholic devotion to the one and only
Immaculate Heart throughout the world. That being the case, the Cardinal had a
duty to reveal his bias and abstain from the matter, instead of pretending to
give an "interpretation" that is really an attempt to debunk and discredit that
which he purports to "interpret."

What was left of the
Message of Fatima after Cardinal Ratzinger and Bertone got done with it on June
26? On this point, Cardinal Ratzinger, Msgr. Bertone, and Fr. Dhanis all agree:
"What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the text of
the secret: the exhortation to prayer as the path of
salvation for souls (sic) and, likewise, the summons to
penance and conversion." On June 26, 2000 the Message of Fatima became Fatima
Lite: a watered-down prescription for personal piety without any specific
relevance to the future.

For this the
Mother of God came to earth and called down the Miracle of the Sun? It is
interesting to note that even in presenting this minimalist version of the
Message, Cardinal Ratzinger could not write about salvation for souls without
bracketing those words with the same squeamish quotation marks he used to
distance himself from the words devotion, triumph and
immaculate in his commentary. It seems even Fatima Lite is not quite
light enough in Catholic content for the ecumenical palates of modern
churchmen.

As for Our
Ladys prophetic warning that "various nations will be annihilated" if the
consecration of Russia were not done, this we are apparently supposed to
forget. There will be no annihilation of nations, "Fatima is all in the past."
Cardinal Sodano says as much. Cardinal Ratzinger agrees.

The Party Line on the Consecration of
Russia

We have mentioned
Archbishop Bertones role in TMF. His principal contributions to
the farce were two:

First, Bertone issued
the "command" (binding, of course, on no one) that the faithful must cease
asking for the Consecration of Russia: "Hence any further discussion or request
[of the Consecration] is without basis."

To support this
claim, Bertone cited exactly one piece of evidence: the manifestly fake "letter
of November 8, 1989" from "Sister Lucy" to Mr. Noelker, which we have already
mentionedthe same letter in which "Sister Lucy" writes about a
consecration of the world by Pope Paul VI at Fatima which she never witnessed
because it never happened. Tellingly enough, Bertone fails to identify the
addressee of the letter. Nor does he provide the world with a copy to examine,
lest anyone notice the fatal blunder concerning Pope Pauls nonexistent
"consecration of the world." Even more telling, TMF contains absolutely
no direct testimony by Sister Lucy herself concerning the Consecration, even
though Bertone himself had interviewed her about the Third Secret only two
months earlier, and she was readily available to Cardinal Ratzinger and the
entire Vatican apparatus during the beatification ceremony in May.

Small wonder.
TMFs version of the "consecration of Russia" which is to say
Cardinal Sodanos versionflatly contradicts a lifetime of testimony
to the contrary by Sister Lucy. We consider a few examples here.

Over 55 years ago, on
July 15, 1946, the eminent author and historian, William Thomas Walsh
interviewed Sister Lucy, which is recounted in his important work, Our Lady
of Fatima, which sold over one million copies. At this interview, which
appears at the books end, Mr. Walsh asked her pointed questions about
thecorrect procedure for the Collegial Consecration:

Finally we came to
the important subject of the second July secret, of which so many different and
conflicting versions have been published. Lucia made it plain that Our Lady did
not ask for the consecration of the world to Her Immaculate Heart. What
She demanded specifically was the consecration of Russia. She did not
comment, of course, on the fact that Pope Pius XII had consecrated the world,
not Russia, to the Immaculate Heart in 1942. But she said more than once, and
with deliberate emphasis: What Our Lady wants is that the Pope and all
the bishops in the world shall consecrate Russia to Her Immaculate Heart on one
special day. If this is done, She will convert Russia and there will be peace.
If it is not done, the errors of Russia will spread through every country in
the world.33

Sister Lucy is clear
and forthright. The collegial consecration requested by Heaven is the
Consecration of Russia, not the world, which must be done by the
Pope in union with the worlds bishops on the same day.

Then there is the
little-known revelation of Our Lady to Sister Lucy in the early 1950s, which is
recounted in Il Pellegrinaggio Della Meraviglie, published under the
auspices of the Italian episcopate. The Virgin Mary appeared to Sister Lucy in
May 1952 and said "Make it known to the Holy Father that I am always awaiting
the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart. Without the Consecration,
Russia will not be able to convert, nor will the world have
peace."34

Thus, 10 years after
Pope Pius XIIs 1942 Consecration of the world, we have the report of Our
Lady reminding Sister Lucy that Russia will not be converted, nor will there be
peace, unless Russia is consecrated by name.

Thirty years later,
in 1982, Sister Lucys testimony remains steadfast. On May 12, 1982, the
day before the attempted 1982 consecration, the Vaticans own
LOsservatore Romano published an interview of Sister Lucy by
Father Umberto Maria Pasquale, a Salesian priest, during which she told Father
Umberto that Our Lady had never requested the Consecration of the world, but
only the Consecration of Russia:

At a certain moment
I said to her: "Sister, I should like to ask you a question. If you cannot
answer me, let it be. But if you can answer it, I would be most grateful to you
... Has Our Lady ever spoken to you about the Consecration of the world
to Her Immaculate Heart?"

"No, Father Umberto! Never! At the
Cova da Iria in 1917 Our Lady had promised: I shall come to ask for the
Consecration of Russia ... In 1929, at Tuy, as She had promised,
Our Lady came back to tell me that the moment had come to ask the Holy Father
for the Consecration of that country (Russia)."

This testimony was
confirmed by Sister Lucy in a handwritten letter to Father Umberto, which the
priest also published. (See photographic reproduction below.) A translation of
the letter reads:

Reverend Father
Umberto, in replying to your question, I will clarify: Our Lady of Fatima, in
Her request, referred only to the Consecration of Russia ...  Coimbra
13 IV - 1980 (signed) Sister Lucia

Again, on March 19,
1983, at the request of the Holy Father, Sister Lucy met with the Papal Nuncio,
Archbishop Portalupi, Dr. Lacerda, and Father Messias Coelho. During this
meeting, Sister Lucy confirmed that Pope John Pauls Consecration of 1982
did not fulfill the requests of Our Lady. Sister Lucy said:

In the act of
offering of May 13, 1982, Russia did not appear as being the object of the
consecration. And each bishop did not organize in his own diocese a public and
solemn ceremony of reparation and Consecration of Russia. Pope John Paul II
simply renewed the consecration of the world executed by Pius XII on October
31, 1942. From this consecration we can expect some benefits, but not the
conversion of Russia.35

She concluded, "The
Consecration of Russia has not been done as Our Lady had demanded it. I
was not able to say it because I did not have the permission of the Holy
See."36

A year later, on
March 25, 1984, Pope John Paul II made an act of offering wherein he again
consecrated "the world", not Russia. As with the 1982 Consecration, "each
bishop did not organize in his own diocese a public and solemn ceremony of
reparation and consecration of Russia". Concerning this ceremony Frère
François writes: "In the months which followed the act of offering of
March 25, 1984, which was only a renewal of the act of 1982, the principal
scholars of Fatima agreed in saying that the consecration of Russia had not yet
been done as Heaven wished it."37

Such was also the
conviction of Father Antonio Maria Martins,38 and of Father Messias
Coelho who, on the eve of March 25, 1984, had announced in Mensagem de
Fátima, of which he is the publisher-editor, "Consecration of
Russia: It will not be done yet this time." He further explained, "It is
certain the more contains the less. Apparently therefore, the
Consecration of the world will perhaps give the impression of
having the power to take the place of consecrating specifically Russia.
However, the problem cannot be resolved in logical terms, nor even in the light
of systematic theology."39

These theologians
based their statements not only on the bald fact that a consecration of Russia
needs to mention the word "Russia", but also on the testimony of Sister Lucy
herself.

On Thursday, March
22, 1984, two days before the act of offering, the Carmel of Coimbra was
celebrating Sister Lucys seventy-seventh birthday. She received on that
day, as was her custom, her old friend Mrs. Eugenia Pestana. After extending
good wishes to her Carmelite friend, Mrs. Pestana asked, "Then Lucy, Sunday is
the Consecration?" Sister Lucy, who had already received and read the text of
the Popes consecration formula made a negative sign and declared "That
consecration cannot have a decisive character."40

The "decisive
character" which is the stamp of the proper consecration is the miraculous
conversion of Russia. Although the new "ecumenical orientation" of the Church
has confused the issue, the conversion of Russia means conversion to
Catholicism. This is not only a matter of common sense, but it is also
found in the testimony of Father Joaquin Alonso, probably the foremost Fatima
expert of the 20th Century. Father Alonso, who had many interviews with Sister
Lucy, wrote in 1976:

... we should
affirm that Lucia always thought that the conversion of
Russia is not to be limited to the return of the Russian people to the Orthodox
Christian religions, rejecting the Marxist atheism of the Soviets, but
rather,it refers purely, plainly and simply to the total, integral
conversion of Russia to the one true Church of Christ, the Catholic
Church.41

In a 1985 interview
in Sol de Fatima, Sister Lucy was asked if the Pope fulfilled the
request of Our Lady when he consecrated the world in 1984. Sister Lucy replied:
"There was no participation of all the bishops, and there was no mention of
Russia." She was then asked, "So the consecration was not done as
requested by Our Lady?" to which she replied: "No. Many bishops attached
no importance to this act."42

Even Father Rene
Laurentin, a comrade of the progressivists, admitted in 1986 that "Sister Lucy
remains unsatisfied43 ... Lucy seems to think that the Consecration
has not been made as Our Lady wanted it."44

Then on July 20,
1987, Sister Lucy was interviewed quickly outside her convent while voting.
Here she told journalist Enrique Romero that the Consecration of Russia has not
been done as requested.45

More of Sister
Lucys affirmations that the 1984 consecration did not fulfill
Heavens conditions could be cited,46 but the point is made:
Msgr. Bertone and Cardinal Ratzinger, following Sodanos Party Line, were
relying entirely on a single, manifestly bogus letter to overcome more
than fifty years of unwavering testimony by Sister Lucy on Heavens
requirements for an effectual consecration of Russia. They had not dared to ask
Sister Lucy about the matter themselvesor, if they had, she had not
provided answers consistent with the Party Line.47

The Party Line on Fatima and World
Peace

This brings us to
Msgr. Bertones second contribution to the farce. It came in the form of
this statement:

The decision of His
Holiness Pope John Paul II to make public the third part of the "secret" of
Fatima brings to an end a period of history marked by tragic human lust for
power and evil, yet pervaded by the merciful love of God and the watchful care
of the Mother of Jesus and of the Church.

It is difficult to
find words to express the offensiveness of this absurd claim. Here
Sodanos Party Line seriously proposes that an entire era of human lust
for power and evil has been brought to an end with the Vaticans
"disclosure" of the obscure vision of the "Bishop dressed in White." In which
case, why did the Vatican wait forty years to bring on world peace, when all it
had to do, according to Msgr. Bertone, was stage a press conference in 1960 to
publish this vision?

Cardinal Sodano
evidently recognized that he must provide the faithful with some sort of
counterfeit to take the place of the triumph of the Immaculate Heart, which had
never materialized following the 1984 "consecration of Russia." The press
conference of June 26, 2000 was thus presented as the great culmination of the
Message of Fatima!

But somehow Msgr.
Bertone and Cardinal Ratzinger alike had managed to ignore the obvious
implications of Sister Lucys letter to the Pope of May 12, 1982, which
they themselves had (in part) photographically reproduced in TMF:

And if we have not
yet seen the complete fulfillment of the final part of this prophecy, we are
going towards it with great strides.48 If we do not reject the
path of sin, hatred, revenge, injustice, violations of the rights of the human
person, immorality and violence, etc. And let us not say that it is God
who is punishing us in this way; on the contrary it is people themselves who
are preparing their own punishment.

This 1982 letter
makes absolutely no reference to the 1981 assassination attempt; much
less does it characterize the attempt as any sort of fulfillment of the Third
Secret. Clearly, a year after the attempt Sister Lucy remained worried about a
global chastisement in consequence of the Churchs failure to heed the
imperatives of the Fatima Message. She certainly was not writing to the Pope
about the triumph of the Immaculate Heart, but rather the annihilation of
nations.

Also very curious is
that the same letter from Sister Lucy (which Ratzinger and Bertone tell us was
addressed to Pope John Paul II) contains the phrase: "The third part of the
secret that you are so anxious to know (que tanto ansiais por
conhecer)". Why would the Pope be "so anxious to know" the third part of the
Secret if he already had the text in his possession at the Vatican, where it
has been lodged since 1957? Why would His Holiness be "so anxious to know" what
he had already read in 1981 (as Bertone/Ratzinger claim), or as early as 1978,
as papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told the Portuguese press?

It is highly
suspicious that the phrase "you are so anxious to know" is deleted from
every Vatican translation of the original Portuguese letter in the various
language versions of the Cardinal Ratzinger/Bertone commentary. Even the
Portuguese language version of TMF omits the phrase "you are so anxious
to know" from the Portuguese typeset reproduction of the original
letter. Clearly, the Vatican apparatus wanted to avoid a storm of questions
about how the Pope could be anxious to know something he already knew. But by
the time reporters could compare their translations with the original
Portuguese letter, the press conference was over and no further questions could
be asked.

Two conclusions are
possible: Either the letter was not really written to the Pope, or there was
something more to the Secret which the Pope really did not know as of May 12,
1982, the date of the purported letter from Sister Lucy. As Sir Walter
Scotts famous aphorism goes: "Oh! what a tangled web we weave, when first
we practice to deceive."49 The first liethat Fatima belongs to
the pastleads to a tangled web of other lies in order to cover up the
first.

Targeting Father Gruner

But there was more to
be done in this campaign to bury Fatima in the past. What about "the Fatima
priest", whose apostolates publications and broadcasts were persistently
and quite effectively hammering home the point that the Vatican apparatus,
pursuing its new vision of the Church, had turned its back on the Virgins
requests? At the end of the June 26 press conference, Cardinal Ratzinger went
out of his way to mention Father Nicholas Gruner by name, stating that Father
Gruner must be "submissive to the Magisterium" on the question of the
Consecration of Russia, which (so the Party Line goes) was now over and done
with. But the Magisteriumthe authoritative teaching office of the
Churchhad taught nothing of the kind. There was only the Sodano
Interpretation of Fatima, and TMFs non-binding "attempt" to
explain away all of the specific prophetic content of the Fatima
Message50 (leaving only prayer and penance).

Ratcheting up this
persecution, the Vaticans Congregation for the Clergy had, only days
before the June 26 press conference, sent Father Gruner a letter containing the
astounding threat that he would be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
This letter was followed up with a communiqué to the bishops of the
Philippines (where Father Gruners apostolate is strongly supported),
advising that Father Gruner would be excommunicated unless (among other things
demanded) he "reconciled himself to Church authorities"that is, return to
the Diocese of Avellino, close down his apostolate and bow to the Party Line on
Fatima. For his own part, the Bishop of Avellino had never needed Father
Gruners services, never supported him financially since 1978, and had
never taken any steps to secure a proper immigration visa for the "return" to
Avellino. The Bishop of Avellino was nothing but a pawn in the Secretary of
States chess game. (We will have more to say about this travesty in later
chapters.)

In his remarks about
Father Gruner at the end of the June 26 press conference, Cardinal Ratzinger
had also noted that Father Gruner was no doubt suffering from
angosciathe Italian word for extreme mental anguish. Cardinal
Ratzinger obviously knew of the threat of excommunication, which would indeed
cause angoscia in any faithful priest who loves the Church. But Father
Gruners plight is only emblematic of the plight of the Church as a whole
in the post-conciliar epoch: a priest who has committed no offense against
faith and morals is personally threatened with excommunication by the very head
of the Congregation for the Clergy, while throughout the Church predators in
Roman collars molest altar boys or spread heresy as their bishops move them
from place to place or conceal their activities and protect them from
punishment; and the Congregation for the Clergy does nothing.

What is to explain
this outrageous disparity of justice? There seems to us only one sensible
explanation, based on what we have shown thus far: In the Catholic Church of
the post-conciliar Adaptation the one unforgivable offense, just as in
Stalinist Russia, is to buck the Party Line. And Father Gruner had bucked the
Party Line on Fatima.

Exit Our Lady, Enter Gorbachev

We have claimed that
this mockery and obscuration of the Fatima Messagethe Party Line on
Fatimawas intended to bury it once and for all, so that Cardinal Sodano
could get on with his pursuit of the Churchs new orientation. Here is a
particularly compelling example of what we mean:

Fatima having been
"gently debunked" (to quote the Los Angeles Times) by Cardinal Ratzinger
and Msgr. Bertone on June 26, the Vatican apparatus, led by Cardinal Sodano,
immediately got down to what it considers the serious business of the Church.
The very next day Mikhail Gorbachev was seated as a guest of honor between
Cardinals Sodano and Silvestrini at a Vatican "press conference." What was the
purpose of this press conference? It was called to celebrate one of the key
elements of the Churchs new orientation: Ostpolitik, the policy of
"dialogue" and accommodation with Communist regimes (including Red China) that
persecute the Church. The immediate occasion for the press conference was the
posthumous publication of the memoirs of Cardinal Casaroli, the grand architect
of Ostpolitik and Cardinal Sodanos predecessor in enforcing the
Party Line of the Secretary of State.51

In true Stalinist
fashion, no questions from the press were permitted at this curious "press
conference"a press conference with no questions from the press! Evidently
the Vatican wanted to be sure that no one bucked the Party Line with any
questions about Fatima, or why the Vatican was honoring the likes of Mikhail
Gorbachev, a man who admits he is still a Leninist and whose tax-free
foundations are promoting the use of abortion and contraception to eliminate
four billion people from the worlds population.52 This is not
even to mention this blood-drenched characters public defense of the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when he was still head of the Soviet Communist
Partya genocidal campaign that included planting bombs disguised as toys,
so that Afghan children would have their limbs and heads blown
off.53

Could there be a more
dramatic demonstration of the fundamental opposition between the Church of all
time and the Church of the Adaptation? On June 26, 2000 Our Lady of Fatima was
shown the door, Her heavenly message audaciously censored and revised by men
who would dare to consign it to oblivion. Then, a day later, Mikhail Gorbachev
entered the Vatican to celebrate the Churchs new orientation, as
implemented by the late Cardinal Casaroli and by his successor, Cardinal
Sodano.

Gorbachev, leader of
the culture of death, was honored by the Vatican again on November 4, 2000 when
he addressed the Pope and other prelates at the "Jubilee of Politicians"a
dinner gala for about 5,000 of the worlds rulers of godless secular
republics. The photographers captured the Pope listening very attentively to a
speech by this key promoter of the abortion holocaust.54 This
grotesque mixture of a Jubileea spiritual tradition in the Church derived
from an Old Testament customwith speeches by pro-abortion politicians on
secular matters, is only typical of the new orientation, which constantly seeks
to merge the Church with the world in the great Adaptation of Roman Catholicism
to "modern civilization".

Gorbachev admits that he is
still a Leninist, and he continually promotes abortion, population control and
his Leninist principles through his State of the World Forum. Gorbachev was
invited by Cardinal Sodano to sit beside him at the Vatican press conference of
June 27, 2000 to promote Cardinal Casaroli's memoirs upholding the Vatican
policy of Ostpolitik, which refuses to denounce the errors of Communism
and state atheism. Pictured above is Gorbachev, invited to the Vatican in
November 2000 to address the Pope and other Vatican curial officials and
politicians at the "Jubilee of Politicians".

7. Father Maurers remarks appeared in an
interview in Catholic World Report, Feb. 2001. A synopsis and
commentary on this interview was published in "The Myth of a Converted Russia
Exposed", Marian Horvat, Ph.D., Catholic Family News, March
2001.

9. Regarding alcohol in Russia, researchers
concluded: "Russias rate of alcohol consumption, traditionally among the
highest in the world, and rising significantly in the 1990s, is a major
contributor to the countrys health crisis ... alcoholism has reached
epidemic proportions, particularly among males ... A 1995 Russian study found
that regular drunkenness affected between 25 and 60 percent of blue-collar
workers ... In 1994 some 53,000 people died of alcohol poisoning, an increase
of about 36,000 since 1991." In the ten years since the alleged conversion of
Russia, there has also been a sharp increase in illegal drug use: "In 1995 an
estimated 2 million Russians used narcotics, more than twenty times the total
recorded ten years earlier in the entire Soviet Union, with the number of users
increasing 50 percent every year in the mid-1990s."From Mark Fellows,
"This Present Darkness", Part II, Catholic Family News, Sept.
2000.

10. "Satanism on the Rise in Russia" compiled by
John Vennari. See www.fatima.org/satanism. html.

11. "Russia Legalizes Homosexuality", United
Press International, May 28, 1993. To quote the beginning of the article:
"Russias homosexual activists Friday celebrated a major victory for gay
rights in post-Soviet Russia following the repeal of Article 121 of the Soviet
criminal code, which outlawed consensual sex between men. This is great
news for gays and lesbians in Russia, said Vladislav Ortanov, editor of
the Moscow gay magazine Risk."

19. For a good treatment of the falsehood of the
Noelker letter, see Mark Fellows, "This Present Darkness" Part II, Catholic
Family News, Sept. 2000.

20. The principle which requires that authority
be exercised at the lowest possible level to avoid tyranny through excessive
centralization of government. For example, the budget of a town should be
determined by the town Fathers, not by the state or federal
government.

21. Under the old structure, before 1967, the
Pope presided over the Roman Curia. Under the new structure, since 1967, it is
the Vatican Secretary of State who presides over the Roman Curia. The reader is
invited to check the Annuario Pontificio both before and after 1967 to
see the change in the structure of the Roman Curia.

22. A French priest showed the Masonic document
to, among others, the American priest Father Paul Kramer.

25. For the details of the long and tortuous
"proceedings" to silence Father Gruner, the reader may consult: Fatima
Priest (Fourth Edition), A Law for One Man (both available from the
Fatima Center, 17000 State Route 30, Constable, New York 12926) or visit the
Fatima web site at www.fatima.org.

26. Regarding the on-again, off-again
beatification ceremony and related matters, see: the daily newspaper Correio
da Manhã of 14 October 1999, the article on p. 12; the weekly
newspaper Jornal de Leiria of 14 October 1999, p. 24; the weekly
newspaper A Ordem on 21 October 1999, p. 1; the official weekly of the
Patriarchate of Lisbon Voz da Verdade on 31 October 1999, on p. 6, the
article entitled "The Beatification of the Little Shepherds Definitely Will Be
At Rome"; the official weekly of the Patriarchate of Lisbon Voz da
Verdade on 5 December 1999, entitled "The Pope Will Return to Portugal;
Fatima is the Place of the Beatification"; article in Euronoticias on 24
March 2000, p. 8, entitled "Bishop of Leiria-Fatima" March 21 press conference;
weekly Euronoticias of 24 March 2000, on p. 8, "Crisis: The Bishop of
Leiria-Fatima Creates A Mystery Around the Visit of the Pope Without Telling
the Patriarch What It Concerns, Will the Pope Reveal the Third Secret?";
Euronoticias of 24 March, an article on p. 9 entitled "Analysis: Persons
Who Have Studied the Apparitions Say That the Third Secret Could Concern the
Destruction of the Faith. A Crisis in the Interior of the Church Would be the
Third Secret".

30. On this point we refer the reader again to
the following articles: in Euronoticias on 24 March 2000, p. 8, entitled
"Bishop of Leiria-Fatima" March 21 press conference; weekly Euronoticias
of 24 March 2000, on p. 8, "Crisis: The Bishop of Leiria-Fatima Creates A
Mystery Around the Visit of the Pope Without Telling the Patriarch What It
Concerns, Will the Pope Reveal the Third Secret?"; Euronoticias of 24
March, an article on p. 9 entitled "Analysis: Persons Who Have Studied the
Apparitions Say That the Third Secret Could Concern the Destruction of the
Faith. A Crisis in the Interior of the Church Would be the Third
Secret".

31. Dhanis entire thesis against Fatima is
explained and critiqued in Frère Michel, The Whole Truth About Fatima
- Volume I, Part II, Chapter 1. All quotations concerning his false theory
are from this source.

34. Il Pellegrinaggio Della Meraviglie,
p. 440. Rome, 1960. This same work, published under the auspices of the Italian
episcopate, affirms that this message was communicated to Pope Pius XII in
June. Also, Canon Barthas mentioned that apparition in his communication to the
Mariological Congress of Lisbon-Fatima, in 1967; see De Primoridiis cultus
marianae, Acta congressus mariologici-mariana in Lusitania anno 1967
celebrati, p. 517. Rome, 1970. See Fatima: Tragedy and Triumph, pp.
21 and 37.

45. This testimony of Sister Lucy was reported
in the early August (1987) edition of Para Ti published in Argentina.
See World Enslavement or Peace ... Its Up to the Pope, Father
Nicholas Gruner (Immaculate Heart Publishing, 1989), pp. 212-213.

46. For more testimony, see Chapter VI of
Fatima: Tragedy and Triumph.

47. The reported November 17, 2001 interview
between Archbishop Bertone and Sister Lucy is treated at length in Chapter 14,
"Let us Hear the Witness, For Heavens Sake".

48. The Vatican translation "we are going
towards it little by little with great strides" is clearly defective. The words
"little by little" do not appear in the handwritten Portuguese original
published on p. 9 of TMF provided by the Vatican itself. We have thus
provided our own accurate translation.

50. It should be noted that Cardinal Ratzinger
himself said regarding the Vaticans interpretation of the Third Secret,
"The Church does not want to impose an interpretation". This quotation was
reported in: "Final Secret of Vatican Published by Vatican", Boston Herald,
June 27, 2000; "Vaticans Secret is Out", The Express,
June 27, 2000; "Vatican Unease as it Reveals the Full Third Secret
of Fatima", Financial Times (London), June 27, 2000; "Fatima
Snapshot of Martyrs Past Century", The Irish Times,
June 27, 2000.

52. In September 1995, Gorbachev held his "State
of the World Forum" in San Francisco. Over 4000 of the worlds "elite"
paid $5,000 per person to attend the 5-day event. In a closing plenary session
of the forum, a philosopher/author named Sam Keen provided a summary and
concluding remarks on the conference. It reveals the Forums anti-life,
anti-Christian ethos. To the conference participants, Keen said: "there was
very strong agreement that religious institutions have to take the primary
responsibility for the population explosion. We must speak far more clearly
about sexuality, about contraception, about abortion, about the values that
control the population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the
population crisis. Cut the population by 90 percent and there arent
enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage." See
"Worlds elite gather to talk depopulation," John Henry Western, The
Interim, April 1996.

53. See interview with Afghan official Abdul
Shams in Review of the News, July 1985.

54. Photograph published in Catholic Family
News, January 2001, p. 13.